The term “Internet of Things” has come to describe a number of technologies and research disciplines that enable the Internet to reach out into the real world of physical objects. Technologies like Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), short-range wireless communications, real-time localization and sensor networks are now becoming increasingly common, bringing the Internet of Things into commercial use. They foreshadow an exciting future that closely interlinks the physical world and cyberspace—a development that is not only relevant to researchers, but to corporations and individuals alike. This development is now moving, not only into the operator space, but also to other areas, such as e.g. transportation and healthcare. This concept includes widespread use of Machine to machine (M2M) devices, i.e. devices which are deployed to collect data and provide the collected data to the network for further processing. How and when data is collected is out of scope of this disclosure, and may therefore be done according to any rules and procedures which may be applied for M2M devices arranged in broadcast service areas as described herein.
With the increase in the number of used M2M devices, acting as either standalone M2M devices collecting data, or acting as aggregation points for other M2M devices, a problem arises when it comes to how to make use of the network resources for transmission of collected data over a network more efficiently.
If all M2M devices starts to push data whenever they are able to, it will result in high amounts of data being fed into the network in an untimely manner which may very well result in bursts of traffic over the top of the existing high amount of data traffic towards the users. Thus it becomes extremely important to manage not just the outflow of data from the network but also the influx of data towards the network. This is today not controlled by the network and may therefore be a cause of problems with existing solutions, and will probably become an even bigger problem in the future. Most importantly, this issue will multiply with each M2M device deployed in the network.